Collectors and Collecting
Unbound:
Visionary Women Collecting Textiles was curated by June Hill with Lotte
Crawford and with support from Amanda Game and Jennifer Hallam.
In the introduction
to her article, Collectors and Collecting, in the exhibition’s
complimentary catalogue, June Hill introduces the ideas surrounding collecting
which are central to the Unbound
exhibition, and also how these themes have been explored in previous
exhibitions at Two Temple Place:
"Collecting is a conscious
act of selection that takes something from one context and places it in
another. The reasons that determine these choices are varied. For a museum,
where acquisitions are made in perpetuity, the long-term public benefit
carries considerable weight. Curators play an influential role in shaping such
decisions, ensuring each piece is relevant, authentic and an appropriate
addition to the existing collections.
A considerable portion of
that pre-existing material will reflect decisions made by other individuals,
with the Victorian vogue for collecting an important factor in the formation of
numerous museum collections. This history was explored in Two Temple Place’s
2015 exhibition, Cotton to Gold: Extraordinary Collections of the Industrial
North West, which examined the impact of eleven cotton barons whose
philanthropic donations of objects and finance were pivotal to the
establishment of three local authority museums in Lancashire.
The collectors in Cotton
to Gold were typical of others who turned private possessions into public
assets. This particular group of eleven acquired extremely fine objects: Roman
coins, medieval manuscripts, Turner watercolours, Tiffany glass, Japanese
prints, religious icons and ivory sculptures. These remain treasures in the
museums where they are held. They also reflect a particular view of what
constitutes a museum object: something rare and precious, artefacts
representative of an accepted culture.
In Beyond Beauty:
Transforming the Body in Ancient Egypt (Two Temple Place, 2016) the
collectors were Egyptologists, and included several women. Two of these, Annie
Barlow and Amelia Oldroyd, also used textile wealth to fund acquisitions for
local museums. Like their counterparts in Cotton to Gold, Barlow and
Oldroyd were also part of a wider network of pioneering collectors, in their
instance women archaeologists and anthropologists, six of whom featured in Intrepid
Women: Fieldwork in Action, 1910- 1957 an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers
Museum, Oxford, (October 2018-March 2019).
Unbound: Visionary
Women Collecting Textiles takes these themes a step further by focusing on seven women
collectors active at different periods and in varied contexts. Taking textiles
as a connecting thread, their work offers insights into the important role
played by women collectors, the diverse reasons material is collected and the
manner in which collection-based knowledge shifts and evolves over time.
There is always a
subjective element to collecting, no matter how disciplined the individual and
how clear the framework in which they operate. This can lead to idiosyncratic
collections of random objects, fascinating but unfocused. A visionary collector,
by comparison, brings an informed personal perspective that sees beyond the
bounds of convention and extends known territory. This is a quality shared by
all those featured in Unbound."
You can read the rest of
June Hill’s article here in the exhibition catalogue.
Thank you for the blog - is there a link to June Hill's exhibition catalogue?
ReplyDeleteHi, thank you for the comment! We have a copy of our Two Temple Place Unbound exhibition catalogue which has essays written by various people involved in the exhibition along with June Hill https://twotempleplace.org/exhibitions/unbound/. Please copy the link into your web browser or go to the Unbound exhibition page on our website www.twotempleplace.org
Delete